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On Sunday, when it was reported that the filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, had been stabbed to death at their home in Los Angeles, the news seemed so senseless and baffling, so at odds with Reiner’s lovable image, that it didn’t properly compute. Who could possibly want to kill Rob Reiner, that big comedic Teddy bear, the closest thing America had to a collective dad? The subsequent revelation that the Reiners’ son Nick was allegedly responsible for their deaths is as terribly sad as it is sordid.

The news was especially jarring because Reiner’s relationship with his own famous father had always seemed so enviably affectionate. Reiner was born in 1947, in the Bronx, the oldest child of the comedian Carl Reiner and the actress and singer Estelle Reiner. (Estelle would later achieve cinematic immortality in Reiner’s classic film “When Harry Met Sally,” as the woman who deadpans, “I’ll have what she’s having,” after Meg Ryan simulates an orgasm at Katz’s Deli.) Publicly, the Reiner men made an adorable couple. A 1979 issue of People had the cover line “Famous Fathers, Loving Sons,” next to a photo of Carl pinching Rob’s cheek. Especially in Carl’s later years, they liked to pose with their arms around each other, their bald heads pressed warmly together like two big speckled eggs. During COVID quarantine, in 2020, Carl participated in a star-studded online reënactment of Rob’s movie “The Princess Bride.” In the final scene, Rob, tucked under the covers in bed, plays the role of a young grandson, and Carl plays his grandfather. “As you wish,” Carl says, with a tip of his fedora, when his large adult son, with moving plaintiveness, asks if he can come back to read to him the next day. Carl died soon after, at ninety-eight.

As a kid, Reiner idolized Carl and the work that he made. In a recent interview on “Fresh Air,” Reiner said that once, as a little boy, he informed his parents that he wanted to change his name. They anxiously asked him what it would be. “Carl,” Reiner told them. Even as a teen-ager, when most kids want nothing to do with their parents, he would come home from school and listen to “The 2000 Year Old Man,” the era-defining comedy album that Carl made with his friend Mel Brooks. But Carl could be distant, cold, tough. He made it clear that his son had to earn his respect. Curiously enough, the first time that Reiner won his father’s admiration was when he directed a production of the existentialist play “No Exit” while he was a student at U.C.L.A. Carl “came backstage after the performance, and he looked me in the eye, and he said, ‘That was good. No bull,’ ” Reiner recalled. It was Sartre, not Sid Caesar, but it did the trick.

In college, Reiner was drawn to improv, and at twenty-one he was hired, alongside Steve Martin, to write for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” Two years later, he got a crack at fame when Norman Lear—who was “like a second father,” Reiner said—cast him as Michael (Meathead) Stivic, Archie Bunker’s liberal son-in-law in “All in the Family.” This was the early seventies, the peak of the United States’s monoculture; at its height, the show was watched by nearly a third of all Americans. I wasn’t among them—too young. But I will never forget sitting in a movie theatre, forty years later, when Reiner got his own chance to play a voluble, scene-stealing father as (Mad) Max Belfort, the accountant dad of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort, in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.” In two minutes of ranting and raving about his degenerate son’s twenty-six-thousand-dollar dinner bill, Reiner gave an indelible comedic performance destined to be quoted for years to come. He took his casting in stride. “When you’re looking [for] somebody to play the son of me, you want somebody to be really handsome,” he deadpanned to an interviewer at the time. “If you look past the old, the fat, and the bald, what you see is Leonardo DiCaprio.”

After “All in the Family” ended, Reiner wanted to make his own work, not merely appear in someone else’s. What followed was one of the great stretches of popular moviemaking, starting in 1984 with “This Is Spinal Tap,” which reinvented the now ubiquitous mockumentary format, and running through “A Few Good Men,” in 1992. The movies that Reiner made during that span are the kinds of films that accompany people throughout their lives. They are comfort watches in the best sense: classics that entertain, tickle, and console, that can be watched a hundred times over and still give pleasure.

At the top of my own Reiner canon are “The Princess Bride,” from 1987, and “When Harry Met Sally,” from 1989. Reiner, a passionate fan of William Goldman, adapted the former from Goldman’s novel of the same name. For those who have not yet had the pleasure, allow me to set the scene. Our heroine is Buttercup (Robin Wright), a beautiful maiden from the mythical land of Florin. Our hero is her one true love, Westley (Cary Elwes), a farm boy who uncomplainingly carries out her every demand and goes to sea to earn his fortune, only to be captured by pirates. Our villain is Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), who, in Westley’s absence, chooses Buttercup as his bride. As the lovers struggle to reunite, we encounter a kindly giant, a valiant Spaniard, a dastardly six-fingered man, and the repeated use of the word “inconceivable.” These elements are all there in Goldman’s book, but Reiner brings them to life with a kind of magical, theatrically inventive touch, redolent of Old Hollywood, that the age of C.G.I. has all but destroyed. The Rodents of Unusual Size that attack Westley in a swamp work because they are played by small men in rodent suits, rather than coolly conjured from pixels; their deliberate artifice is the thrill, and Reiner provided the voice for their hideous snorts.

What Reiner added to Goldman’s tale was a clever framing device: he presents it as a story read by a grandfather to his grandson, sick in bed, who serves as an avatar for the viewers, and allows the fantasy to be at first punctured, then enhanced, by the more banal reality of our own recognizable world. (“Murdered by pirates is good,” the grandson says, hopefully, when Westley appears to have been done away with, five minutes in.) You can see the influence of Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, and, naturally, Carl Reiner all over the movie, especially in the casting: the utterly un-Sicilian Wallace Shawn as Vizzini the Sicilian, and Billy Crystal as the warty healer Miracle Max, who speaks with the intonation of a Lower East Side streetcart peddler. This tale of two classically beautiful, blond lovers is spiked with a distinctly Jewish sense of humor, one that carries from the Yiddish theatre of the early twentieth century up through “Your Show of Shows” and “Blazing Saddles.” It’s pure American amalgamation—delectable sugar, with just the right amount of salt. By the end, of course, the kid is totally swept up in the adventure, and so are we.

Billy Crystal, Rob Reiner, and Meg Ryan.Courtesy Columbia / Everett

“When Harry Met Sally” is a fairy tale, too—the kind that grownups, this one included, can’t help wanting to believe. What it lacks in sword fights and horseback rides it makes up for with cable-knit sweaters and strolls through Central Park in fall. In 1977, Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) meets Sally Albright (Meg Ryan), after they have just graduated from the University of Chicago. They drive together to New York to begin their adult lives. Harry, who is dating Sally’s friend, makes a pass at Sally. Sally, scandalized, turns him down, and proposes the consolation prize of friendship. Impossible, Harry says. Men and women can’t ever truly be friends; sex always gets in the way. Harry and Sally part; they fall in love with other people; they live their lives. Ten years later, they meet again and click—platonically, they’re sure. Maybe they’re destined to be the best of friends and nothing more. Or, maybe not.

The film is usually associated with Nora Ephron, who wrote the screenplay, and for good reason. There’s the crackling wittiness of the dialogue, and the ingenuity of its construction: all those false starts, in friendship and in love. But it wouldn’t be the same movie without Reiner. He was the template for the bristly, sardonic Harry, as Ephron was for the neurotic yet starry-eyed Sally. And he was responsible, once again, for the all-important casting. Ryan, then relatively unknown, had the part as soon as she read. But Reiner auditioned actor after actor before coming around to Crystal, in spite—or, maybe because of—their close friendship. On paper, the diminutive Crystal hardly screams “romantic lead.” Onscreen, he lets us glimpse the tender heart that Harry is protecting beneath his cynical crust; he makes smart sexy. For my money, the scene in the movie’s final five minutes, in which Harry lets down his guard and confronts Sally with his feelings at a New Year’s Eve party, is the most comic and romantic in any romantic comedy. “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible,” Harry tells Sally—the rationalist’s concession to the ludicrous illogic of love.

It could have gone a different way. Until late in the game, Reiner was planning a final shot in which the two friends would simply walk away from each other, off into their own separate futures. That’s life. Harry would be right to be bitter; Sally’s optimism was for rubes. Reiner himself had been single for a decade, and he didn’t see his luck changing any time soon. Then it did. He was introduced to Michele Singer during filming. They were married in May, 1989, two months before “When Harry Met Sally” premièred. Reiner gave his audience that most delightful and elusive thing: a perfect ending. He should have had the same. ♦

In 1934, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern India, killing thousands and devastating several cities. Curiously, in areas that were spared the worst destruction, stories soon spread that an even bigger disaster was on its way. Leon Festinger, a young American psychologist at the University of Minnesota, read about these rumors in the early nineteen-fifties and was puzzled. Festinger didn’t think people would voluntarily adopt anxiety-inducing ideas. Instead, he reasoned, the rumors could better be described as “anxiety justifying.” Some had felt the earth shake and were overwhelmed with fear. When the outcome—they were spared—didn’t match their emotions, they embraced predictions that affirmed their fright.

Festinger was developing the now ubiquitous theory of cognitive dissonance. He argued that, when people encounter contradictions, they experience so much discomfort that they feel an urgent need to reduce it. In response, a person can update his views—or he can misinterpret, and even reject, whatever information has challenged his beliefs. He might seek out people who agree with him; he might try to persuade those who don’t. “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Festinger later wrote. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” Cognitive dissonance helped explain human choices that otherwise seemed irrational, stubborn, and shortsighted: these were, in fact, attempts to reduce psychological distress.

In 1954, while Festinger was refining his theory, he stumbled upon a rare opportunity to observe the effects of dissonance. A newspaper reported that a small Chicago-area group, the Seekers, were receiving messages from aliens about an impending flood that would submerge North America. Festinger and two colleagues, plus several assistants, went undercover. In an influential 1956 book, “When Prophecy Fails,” the trio wrote that the Seekers committed to the prediction so fully that some quit their jobs while emptying their savings accounts. When no flood or aliens arrived, Festinger and his colleagues wrote, the Seekers tried to reduce the dissonance they were experiencing by recommitting to their belief and evangelizing—a seeming attempt to bring others into alignment with their views. “Their research resulted in convincing, if not definitive, confirmation of their hypotheses,” a reviewer from the American Sociological Review wrote. In 1957, Festinger published another book, “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance,” which described laboratory studies of people acting to resolve dissonance.

It’s hard to overstate how influential the theory is today. “You almost certainly can’t get through an introductory psychology class without hearing about cognitive dissonance,” Adam Mastroianni, writer of the psychology Substack “Experimental History,” told me. The phrase has been invoked to explain why environmentalists eat meat and why some Trump supporters play down the President’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Last month, on social media, memes making fun of Cynthia Erivo, the lead actress in the “Wicked” films, for rushing to protect Ariana Grande from a fan, spread on social media. The musician SZA said that we’d eventually look back on these posts and experience cognitive dissonance.

Lately, though, the foundational case study of the Seekers has been contending with its own kind of dissonance. Until this year, a box of Festinger’s documents—communications with colleagues, research notes, transcribed telephone conversations—in his archives at the Bentley Historical Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, remained sealed at the request of his widow, Trudy. When the files were released, a political scientist named Thomas Kelly discovered that the researchers, who were ostensibly neutral observers, actually wielded a profound level of influence over the Seekers. In a recent peer-reviewed paper, Kelly noted that there were at least five paid observers in addition to the three researchers; at some Seekers meetings, half of those present may have been infiltrators. One research assistant pretended to dream about a flood and receive psychic messages; one of Festinger’s co-authors, Henry Riecken, was revered by the group’s leaders. When the flood didn’t come, Riecken apparently encouraged the Seekers to double down on their beliefs, Kelly told me in November. “Here’s this canonical study, and it’s backwards,” Kelly said. “This is misleading people about the dynamics of new religions and social psychology.”

In the years after Festinger co-authored “When Prophecy Fails,” his stature grew. In a 1959 study, he and a colleague gave Stanford undergraduates excruciatingly boring tasks: moving spools on and off a tray, rotating pegs on a pegboard. Afterward, they were instructed to tell the next participant that the tasks were enjoyable, and in return they were compensated either a dollar or twenty dollars. Right after the students delivered this message, they were asked what they actually thought of the task. Oddly enough, those who had been paid a dollar rated it as more enjoyable than those who were paid twenty dollars.

Joel Cooper, a psychologist at Princeton, remembered reading the study when he was an undergraduate. He was so surprised that he missed his subway stop. “That was unimaginable to the field of psychology at the time,” Cooper said. The prevailing dogma was that people, like Pavlov’s dogs, responded based on rewards. In this instance, those who were rewarded more said they liked the task less.

Festinger thought that cognitive-dissonance theory could explain. In his view, those who had been given more money could justify to themselves why they had lied to their fellow-participants—because they had been paid. Those who’d received only the measly dollar, in contrast, lacked a good reason to have lied, and thus had more cognitive dissonance to resolve. They did so, Festinger thought, by changing their attitude about the task. In another 1959 study, two students of Festinger’s, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills, reported that the more unpleasant it was for a person to join a group, the more they would later say they liked the group. They theorized that group members were justifying the hazing they had tolerated. Cognitive dissonance seemingly provided a tidy account of a wide variety of counterintuitive behavior.

The leader of the Seekers was Dorothy Martin, a fifty-four-year-old housewife who dabbled in occult and Scientology circles. In August, 1954, she began telling people about a flood that would take place on December 21st. In the fall of that year, Festinger and his colleagues joined the group. Martin initially said that aliens would arrive at 4 P.M. on December 17th to save them; then the pickup was moved to midnight on the 18th, then again to Christmas Eve. Then the Seekers began claiming that the group’s actions had “spread so much light” that the flood was called off. In the researchers’ telling, they also ramped up their proselytizing by reaching out to the press.

Kelly, the political scientist, read “When Prophecy Fails” a couple of years ago, out of personal interest. He told me that he was troubled by its simplistic conclusions; his research has shown him that people are messy actors, capable of stubbornness but also of quickly dropping their beliefs after political regimes fall. In 2023, he perused the Festinger archive during a trip to Ann Arbor to visit family. He learned about the box that was sealed until this year, and, in May, he returned to read its contents. What he found disturbed him.

The papers suggested that, when the researchers posed as Martin’s followers, they made the Seekers more convinced of their existing views. Martin saw great significance in the sudden appearance of the newcomers. One of the three co-authors, Stanley Schachter, wrote that a physician in the group “was clearly impressed by these people who, at the last moment for no apparent reason were clearly attracted to the movement. . . . Oy! Have we increased conviction!”

Martin took a liking to Riecken in particular, calling him Brother Henry, and she is said to have told him that he was “the favorite son.” Riecken wrote that he probably “could have taken over the movement.” In the crucial moment when the flood did not arrive, Riecken lashed out at Martin, calling her dense. Outside of her house, Charles Laughead, the physician, confided in Riecken that he had struggled with his own beliefs. Riecken then asked Laughead to reassure him. As Kelly writes in his paper, “Laughead delivered a dramatic speech about the importance of keeping faith, which Riecken interpreted as confirmation of Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance.” After that, Riecken claimed that his faith had been restored; Martin, soothed, channelled a psychic message explaining how the flood had been averted. Riecken continued to take advantage of his privileged status in the group: he said he was an “earthly verifier” who needed to interview each person and report back to the aliens. “Henry enjoyed himself to the hilt with additional horseshit,” Schachter wrote.

Kelly also questioned Festinger, Schachter, and Riecken’s claim that the Seekers redoubled their efforts to spread their message. Before the prophecy failed, Laughead was already outspoken enough about aliens that he lost a job at the Michigan State University health center. He and Martin had both written articles for magazines, and the group had sent a press release to journalists. Martin had also rattled several parent-teacher associations by sharing her views with local children.

Other researchers tried to verify the theory behind “When Prophecy Fails.” In 1962, researchers examined the Church of the True Word, which had foretold a nuclear disaster. Even when the end never came, the group remained intact, and didn’t change its beliefs. “Clearly, either the theory is wrong, or it is incomplete,” the authors wrote. A 1983 study reported that a millenarian Baha’i sect, which also prophesied a nuclear war that never occurred, eventually stopped its activities because its “faith was badly shaken.”

Cognitive-dissonance theory faltered again in 2024. In an effort to replicate research from the eighties, a team of psychologists across thirty-nine labs instructed nearly five thousand college students to write an essay in favor of increasing school tuition, a position they were presumably against. Some were told they had to take this stance; others were allowed to make their own decision. Cognitive-dissonance theory holds that people in the voluntary group would have been more likely to update their opinions on school costs: they couldn’t justify having written dissonant essays on the ground they’d been forced. But the researchers didn’t detect any difference: the two groups changed their minds at similar rates.

Some who study cognitive dissonance doubted these findings. Steven Heine, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, questioned whether all the labs involved in the replication followed the precise protocols required by the study design. Cooper, the Princeton researcher, noted variations between labs. For example, not all the schools charged tuition, so some students wrote about other subjects. “They did a terrible job,” Cooper said. But Willem Sleegers, a social psychologist at Tilburg University and a co-author of the study, pointed out that early proponents of the theory used very similar experimental setups to make their case. If cognitive dissonance really influenced behavior, “we should have been able to find it,” he told me. “We didn’t. So we should be updating our beliefs.”

The concept of cognitive dissonance is appealing, in part, because it lends a name to a recognizable state. I have felt it, I’ve seen it in others, and it seems intuitively true that people respond in some way when confronted with it. Kelly, the political scientist, believes that it’s a real sensation. But a person’s reactions to cognitive dissonance seem more fragmented than the theory accounts for. The idea lacks predictive power, Sleegers said. “It’s still very vague,” he told me.

Kelly’s research showed that Martin walked back her claims in 1955, saying that she’d never expected a literal U.F.O. rescue—but she remained involved in occult groups for the rest of her life. He concluded that she neither increased her proselytizing about the flood nor abandoned her supernatural convictions. Can cognitive dissonance really explain how her wide-ranging beliefs evolved? As Festinger himself wrote, “it would be unfortunate indeed if the concept of dissonance were used so loosely as to have it encompass everything, thus depriving it of meaning entirely.”

In studies of cognitive dissonance with open-ended designs, participants seem to relieve their discomfort in a diversity of ways. In a 2024 study, supporters of Donald Trump were asked about allegations that the President had engaged in sexual misconduct and illegal activity. Some rejected the claims as lies; others said that they didn’t care about the President’s sex life, or that all Presidents are involved in “unscrupulous activity that we don’t hear about.” A minority said that they would no longer support him. Perhaps it’s true that they were all acting to reduce their cognitive dissonance. But how successful is a theory of human behavior if it can’t tell you how people will behave?

In mid-November, I called Aronson, the student of Festinger’s who’d conducted research on hazing and dissonance. At ninety-three years old, he is one of the few people who were in Festinger’s direct orbit when he was developing his theory. During a seminar in 1957, Aronson was impressed by Festinger’s “intelligence, his fervor, and his nastiness.” Festinger was a demanding teacher. Aronson became his research assistant.

Aronson agreed that many strategies can reduce dissonance. How could you know which a person would choose? Their early experiments, he said, weren’t designed to answer that. “You’re not asking the question ‘What pathways would people choose if they had their choice?’ ” Aronson told me. “You’re saying, ‘Does cognitive dissonance exist, and are people reducing it?’ ”

Aronson said that because “When Prophecy Fails” was an observational study—it did not take place in the controlled setting of a lab—he has long considered it a weak example of cognitive-dissonance research. But he insisted that the theory will remain a useful way to understand human behavior. He credited it with teaching us that our actions—even strange and stubborn ones—are more than automatic responses to rewards. Humans are deliberative; they engage in complex cognitive processes even when waiting for U.F.O.s. “Even if it turned out that none of those doomsday cults ever tried to proselytize, it wouldn’t cause the theory to be debunked,” Aronson said. In his view, a large number of laboratory studies back up the theory of cognitive dissonance, so the new revelations about “When Prophecy Fails” didn’t change his mind.

I asked him how the theory could be falsified, since any choice a person made could be attributed to dissonance. “It’s hard to disprove anything,” he said.

By the mid-sixties, Festinger had stopped focussing on cognitive-dissonance theory. He studied visual perception and eventually anthropology. But there are clues that his intuitions about how people behave remained consistent. In his archives, there’s a handwritten note recalling that his father, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, wandered into the city to eat ham at the age of fifteen. He wanted to know if God would punish him for eating food that wasn’t kosher. According to the story, Festinger wrote, “when nothing happened to him he became a confirmed atheist.” But the story left Festinger with doubts: it wouldn’t make sense to subject yourself to God’s wrath if you weren’t already sure of the outcome. A more reasonable explanation, Festinger thought, was that his father must have reduced his cognitive dissonance before eating the ham—by losing his belief in God. “I imagine that, on other grounds, he had already rejected religion and the way of life it implied,” Festinger wrote.

I asked Aronson if Festinger seemed to view people as rational deep down, seeking coherence in what looked like chaos. “I think he thought people were capable of rational behavior, and used rational behavior a good deal of the time,” Aronson said. “But underneath that is the fact that we are rationalizing human beings.” ♦

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

The Turing test, a long-established tool for measuring machine intelligence, gauges the point at which a text-generating machine can fool a human into thinking it’s not a robot. ChatGPT passed that benchmark earlier this year, inaugurating a new technological era, though not necessarily one of superhuman intelligence. More recently, however, artificial intelligence passed another threshold, a kind of Turing test for the eye: the images and videos that A.I. can produce are now sometimes indistinguishable from real ones. As new, image-friendly models were trained, refined, and released by companies including OpenAI, Meta, and Google, the online public gained the ability to instantly generate realistic A.I. content on any theme they could imagine, from superhero fan art and cute animals to scenes of violence and war. “Slop,” the term of (not) art for content churned out with A.I., became ubiquitous in 2025, inspiring new sub-coinages such as “slopper,” derogatory shorthand for someone who relies on A.I. to think for them. Slop went beyond the realms of surreal amusement or frivolous entertainment; the relatively anodyne days of bizarre, obviously fake “Shrimp Jesus” images in Facebook feeds are gone. In 2025, the President of the United States relied on A.I. “agitslop” to promote his policies and taunt his detractors, and other politicians followed suit. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, became a kind of omnipresent mascot on Sora, his own company’s social-media feed of slop. Not all of the content was convincing, but a lot of it came close enough—and, in our increasingly audiovisual digital world, that may turn out to represent a more significant Rubicon than the Turing test.

OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli Factory

It seems almost quaint in retrospect. Toward the beginning of the year, OpenAI released its updated GPT-4o model, which had the ability to generate still images within the ChatGPT text window. One of the demos used to promote the product was a group selfie of Sam Altman and a couple of his collaborators transformed into a drawing in the style of the legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, of the animation house Studio Ghibli. The model was shockingly good at mimicking Studio Ghibli’s organic, eminently human aesthetic; the trick went viral, and the internet was flooded with Ghibli slop consisting of random images frictionlessly turned into anime. A foreboding low was reached when the White House’s X account cynically exploited the meme to promote its roundup of immigrants, sharing a Ghibli-ified image showing the arrest of a brown-skinned woman labelled an “alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking.”

The AI Bible

In May, Google released Veo 3, an A.I. video-generation model that could spit out eight-second-long photorealistic clips. A couple months later, an outfit called the AI Bible published an eight-minute video on YouTube that rendered the Rapture in A.I. graphics that looked like outtakes from “Game of Thrones.” No prestige-TV budget was required, only the patience to type prompts into a text box. This slopocalypse racked up more than eight hundred thousand views, suggesting how readily online audiences would embrace vacant facsimiles as must-see TV.

Animals jumping on trampolines

A.I., like an audiovisual genie, can perform wish fulfillment, depicting fantastical things that we’d like to believe were true, and testing our willingness to suspend disbelief. In June, a man in California captured real-life video of coyotes wandering onto a trampoline and playfully bouncing. That footage inspired a frenzy of A.I. videos showing other animals jumping onto trampolines in ways that would surely defy credibility if they weren’t so delightful: rabbits hopping higher than usual, moose performing flips, bears boinging until the mat gives out. Some of this footage passed as real in part because it used the aesthetic of infrared surveillance cameras, showing shadowy creatures at night. Those who paid close attention might have noticed that the animals tended to appear from nowhere and multiply or disappear—but, of course, when you’re scrolling through a video feed, there’s little incentive to look twice.

Sam Altman Stealing G.P.U.s

At first, slop was a widely derided format, the kind of clicky nonsense churned out by content farms or trolls. But, in September, with the launch of OpenAI’s Sora app, a social network and feed for A.I.-generated videos, the company set about convincing users that slop was something we should all be making for fun. Sora allowed you to turn yourself into a kind of A.I. puppet, to be adopted and remixed by other users at will. Altman made himself a test subject for the feature, resulting in one of the most popular videos across the new platform: a clip of Altman stealing G.P.U.s (graphics-processing units, which are needed to run A.I.) from shelves in a Target store and being apprehended by a security guard. The footage was intended as a joke, but a convincing deepfake of someone carrying out a crime is exactly the kind of thing that should scare us.

Andrew Cuomo’s Anti-Mamdani Slop

A.I.’s new talent for making realistic videos was quickly marshalled as a political weapon. In October, the mayoral campaign of the former governor Andrew Cuomo released an A.I.-generated ad featuring “criminals for Zohran Mamdani”—a cast of characters, from wife-beater to shoplifter, based on crude and often racist stereotypes, all of them espousing their support for the now Mayor-elect. The video, which the campaign quickly deleted, demonstrated A.I.’s uncanny ability to render a realism devoid of ethics; it’s hard to imagine human actors agreeing to coöperate with such a ludicrously offensive script. Not long after the ad’s release, social-media accounts under the name Citizens Against Mamdani cropped up, showing supposed locals railing loudly against the “stupid” voters who had led Mamdani to victory. This apparent attempt to AstroTurf an anti-Mamdani movement was cut short when some of the accounts were labelled as A.I. and taken down. Even more than the “criminals for Zohran,” these faux New Yorkers were frighteningly realistic.

Trump’s Flying Excrement and MedBed Slop

Donald Trump began the year sharing an A.I. video of “Trump Gaza,” a redeveloped cityscape of the Palestinian territory stocked with golden statues of himself. It had been generated by two Israeli American filmmakers to satirize Trump’s idea to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” but for Trump it was simply a useful mockup of his vision. The President’s budding affinity for A.I. videos came into full flower in October, when he shared a generated clip of himself piloting a bomber jet emblazoned with the words “King Trump” and dumping what looked like feces on No Kings protesters. The video, relatively cartoonish but nevertheless disgusting, would likely have remained a bit of bizarre internet ephemera if it hadn’t been posted by the actual Commander-in-Chief, presumably as a demonstration of what he wished he could do to his opponents. Another generated clip that Trump shared around the same time showed him on Lara Trump’s Fox News show extolling hospitals specializing in the imaginary, conspiracy theory-derived miracle technology known as “MedBeds.” Either Trump was somehow unaware that the footage was manufactured or he knowingly chose to promote it nonetheless. Either way, it was deepfake news.

The Christmas-Slop Mural on the Thames

As slop becomes ever easier to generate, it is moving off of our screens and into physical spaces. In November, the residents of the outer-London town of Kingston upon Thames were shocked to find that a huge holiday mural installed in a downtown shopping district mixed Christmas cheer with A.I. horror. The scenes were meant to depict a winter fair held on the frozen-over river; the participants, however, were mutant dog-bird hybrids, snowmen with too many eyes, and humanoid bodies packed into an impossibly dense morass. Rumored to have been rendered by the British artist Mat Collishaw, and commissioned by a local landlord, the murals sparked political controversy—did they present some veiled commentary on immigration?—and were soon torn down. One townsperson did appreciate the work, however, describing it as “so bad it’s good.”

McDonalds’s Pure A.I. Ad

If 2025 marked the mainstreaming of slop, it also ushered in an accompanying slop backlash. The shallowness, the glitches, and the too-smooth textures of A.I. content became symbols of chicanery mixed with laziness. This month, McDonald’s Netherlands released a holiday advertisement, created entirely with A.I., titled “It’s the Most Terrible Time of The Year,” depicting various holiday snafus: toppling Christmas trees, baking disasters, carollers caught in a snowstorm. The solution, according to the ad, is to walk into a warm, cozy, unreal McDonald’s restaurant and hide out until January. Both for its negative take on Yuletide rituals and for its sorry attempt to save on production costs, the ad was so poorly received that the company decided to pull it. McDonald’s Netherlands apologized in a statement, acknowledging that, for many of its customers, the holidays are in fact the “most wonderful time of the year.” No one wants to find slop under the Christmas tree. ♦

The magpies appear in the first scene of “Cannon,” in a darkened restaurant littered with broken furniture and plates. I count twenty-one birds, perched and staring. Two figures, the titular Cannon and her best friend, Trish, also look around. They’re rendered in a clean, strong outline against a watercolor background. Only the magpies know who caused this mess. In East Asia, magpies—crow-shaped, in the same Corvidae family, but tailed with brilliant streaks of sapphire and white—are signs of good luck. But is this wreck of a restaurant a happy scene? A progressive closeup of Cannon, sweating and flushed, culminates in a wide-eyed portrait straight out of a Tokugawa-era ukiyo-e print. “One for the road?” Trish asks. Cannon hurls a last plate against the wall. Fwish! Smash!

From there, the graphic novel zooms out and back in time. It’s structured cinematically, with voice-over, pans, and quick cuts. Each page is gridded into four rectangles, like the frames of a film. Cannon’s given name is Lucy—as in “loose cannon.” Trish coined the nickname, which is funny because Cannon never spouts off. She absorbs; she contains. (The nickname, with its masculine overtone, also fits her gender nonconformity.) Cannon is a twentysomething Chinese Canadian in Montreal, decidedly not of that city’s white Francophone class. She works as a cook in a hip but poorly managed restaurant. Her boss, the owner, is a jerk, a caricature of an entitled Québécois man.

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Outside the kitchen, Cannon is going through a lot. Her once fearsome Cantonese-speaking maternal grandfather is shrivelled and ailing. Her mom is in denial and won’t return her calls. Her long friendship with Trish, who’s also Asian Canadian, is skidding toward indifference. And she can’t tell if the girl she likes, a new worker in the front of the house, genuinely likes her back. As a means of escape, Cannon jogs to the soundtrack of guided meditation: “Begin to notice if you’re holding tension in certain places of your body.” Then, the jogging itself becomes a betrayal: sores, soreness, plantar fasciitis. Why, her physiotherapist (ah, Canadian health care!) asks, is she running to the point “that the body starts breaking down?” Cannon: “I guess it feels like a relief.”

Trish is on her own frustrating journey. She’s a fiction writer who feels pressure to follow up on her early success. An older lesbian mentor talks her through some draft material that she plans to submit for an artist’s grant. (I thought, here, of the Canada Council for the Arts, whose public largesse has sustained “Cannon” ’s author, Lee Lai, and thousands of others.) “To the funding board, you’re a piece of a cultural niche,” she tells Trish. “They want a young, queer, Asian voice.” Trish, with her hypothetical, stereotypical diasporic novel within the novel, becomes a double for Lai. But “I’m not the kind of Asian that they want,” she responds, a cheeky swipe at the imagined Western reader. “They’re probably looking for, like, some intergenerational immigration-trauma shit.” Trish is freshly out of a relationship, and fills the space vacated by her ex-girlfriend, and by Cannon, with a heterosexual fuck buddy from the gym. When the guy (who’s quite hot, for a black-and-white drawing) tries to get to know her, she replies, “I’m emotionally unavailable.”

“Cannon” is the second graphic novel by Lai, a thirty-two-year-old Australian who lives in, and makes art about, Montreal. Her first book, “Stone Fruit,” applied a similar visual style (characters in strong outline, hatch marks, soft gouache landscapes, film stills) to similar themes of gulped-down feelings, queer romance, and caregiving. Both books, but especially “Cannon,” are studies of rage in the context of familial (chosen, biological) obligation. For Lai’s characters, and for many of us, home is the place most resistant to real emotion. And moving on from the past doesn’t mean giving it up altogether. In relationships, there’s no such thing as a clean exit.

It’s the mid-aughts, at a public high school in Lennoxville, east of Montreal. Two blond mean girls are bullying Cannon in the cafeteria, and Trish, who’s as loud and uninhibited as Cannon is pent up, intervenes in the most embarrassing way possible. This is their meet-cute. Soon, the two are besties, and Trish is at Cannon’s house every day, eating dinner with Cannon and her mom. “I guess Cannon’s, like, my family person,” Trish tells her fling. In their youth, Cannon and Trish crush on each other, though never at the same time.

They move to Montreal after high school, where they can each afford to live on their own. (This is still somewhat possible for cooks and writers in that city.) Their standing date is dinner and a movie—Australian horror films such as “Howling III: The Marsupials,” whose bloody scenes Lai re-creates in red. (The book is mostly gray scale.) On the couch, in the summer swelter, their sticky bodies are inches apart, even as their souls drift. Trish talks a lot, and talks over Cannon. She later asks to spend more time together—but only to mine Cannon’s life for literary material. Lai draws their exchanges as colliding speech bubbles. Trish’s words efface Cannon’s, which slink off the page. Elsewhere, the meditation tape Cannon listens to on her runs plays over a rapid montage of her life. “Thoughts, after all, can be invasive and preoccupying,” the voice intones, as she and her grandfather eat in silence, a vampire goes in for the kill, and her co-workers panic at the restaurant. “Mindful breathing . . . in . . . and out . . .” I find these intruding speech bubbles more rattling, more effective at conveying failures of communication, than voice-overs onscreen, or ellipses and dashes in a traditional novel. Lai has described comics as a form that “nestles itself between prose and film-making.”

Cannon’s model of restraint (or repression), her mother, lives alone and works as a day-care provider at a Francophone garderie. Gung Gung, Cannon’s grandfather, sort of manages to live on his own, with help from Cannon and a part-time home health aide. He’s isolated, and for good reason. A flashback to his wife’s funeral shows him apart from the crowd, staring out a window. When Cannon’s mom approaches him—“Baba,” she says, touching his shoulder—he turns into a red, superhuman ogre and yells, “Get lost!” in Cantonese. Another long-ago scene suggests that he was physically violent. Having endured a lifetime of this—from stories, Trish has imagined him as a “thunderous tyrant”—Cannon’s mom can’t bear to tend to him, even as he shrinks into disability, “a little walnut man.” It’s on Cannon to cook him pork and mushrooms and rice (why can’t he remember to start the rice cooker in advance?), and to persuade the aide not to quit just because, in the aide’s words, “he’s disagreeable and aggressive” and “doesn’t speak English.” Cannon pleads, “Is this you resigning?,” but can’t seem to get angry at either the aide or her mother. It’s exasperating to observe Cannon’s unaddressed exasperation.

The sprinkling of untranslated Chinese characters and Québécois French is a smart touch, adding to the over-all sense of miscommunication. Cannon’s second and third languages become stumbling blocks for the reader, and visual shortcuts for emotional distance. But Lai isn’t interested in furnishing the kinds of gay-immigrant plot turns that Trish hopes to swipe from Cannon’s life. Whatever, exactly, is festering between Cannon, her mom, and Gung Gung goes largely unsaid. And so, as Trish starts to extrude fiction from reality, she hits a narrative limit: “Something a bit clichéd and sentimental with these family figures,” as her mentor puts it. The embedded diasporic novel fails.

Trish is only one of Cannon’s triggers. The restaurant is a generous font of distress, and takes up as much space in the graphic novel as a job does in real life. (A lot.) Guy, the boss, is the main problem. He seems to think that he owns not only the restaurant but everyone in it. He badgers the male employees, especially Benji, who’s Black and Cannon’s closest co-worker, and presumptuously flirts with the women. He constantly messes with their schedules. One night, the kitchen is slammed—he neglected to plan for a holiday rush. “Boss, I need to know if you open extra tables,” one of the cooks says. “We might not have enough food.” The fryer is packed, there’s a gluten-free demand from the floor, and the dirty dishes are stacking up. (I was reminded of that tragicomic scene from the TV show “The Bear” in which a printer emits an endless succession of online orders—zheek, zheek, zheek—that have no hope of being fulfilled.) Lai evokes this harrowing rush in a cramped, fragmentary sequence. The head cook yells. Arms flail. Speech bubbles in English and French crisscross and get cut off. The episode explodes when, from the kitchen side of the pass-through window, Cannon spots her work crush within kissing distance of the boss. Cannon’s agonized face fills the frame. “I . . . I think I gotta go,” she tells Benji. “I need to leave now.”

At moments of intensity, the magpies appear—to Cannon, at least. They also accompany her, overhead, on her runs through town. The birds aren’t quite a leitmotif but rather a signpost of inaccessible feelings. They are real enough that Cannon mentions them to Trish and Benji. Trish ventures, “They’re probably just looking out for you.”

I grew attached to Cannon; I wanted to shake her, to shake loose a scream. I remembered wanting the same thing for the protagonists of “Stone Fruit.” The two main characters of that book are a young visual artist named Rachel, and her partner, Bron, who’s trans and had an evangelical upbringing. Twice a week, the couple babysits Rachel’s preschool-age niece, with whom they lovingly escape into a woodland fantasy. In nature, the three transform into swift reptilian beasts who romp and belt out improvised songs. These animal forms, like Cannon’s magpies, connect the characters to what Rachel calls a “feral and screamy” plane of emotion. The presence of the child distracts from adult conflicts. There’s boiling—Bron ghosts Rachel for way too long—but not a boiling over. Lai’s approach in that book is more restrained, in terms of both narrative and visual technique. In their speech bubbles, for instance, the characters respect one another’s boundaries. I felt a distance from their psyches as well.

“Cannon” offers a deeper, tougher portrait—of an accidental caregiver in need of care. It isn’t a political novel, though it raises political questions: how to metabolize different forms of fury and grief; how to feel private pain (and pleasure) against a backdrop of larger suffering. (I had to banish my own guilt for reading comics during an acutely hideous news cycle.) Gung Gung’s mortality, Québécois racism, sexism and sexual harassment—these can feel like abstractions, too cosmic to provoke specific rage. What gets to Cannon in the end—what breaks her open—is the combination of physical exhaustion, Trish’s opportunism, and a co-worker’s bad faith. She destroys the restaurant in a satisfying, wordless sprint of red, feather-filled pages, but salvages her most important bond.

As Gung Gung is dying, Cannon and Trish take a trip and begin to reconcile. They’re back in Lennoxville, crying and eating mediocre spaghetti in a diner, then laughing about nothing in a humid motel room. When Cannon gets the call from her mom, at the hospital, she puts in her earbuds. “The Peace of the Breath,” her latest New Age soundtrack, unfurls in captioned bits across several panels. “Dear listener, . . . this is no small thing—the search for inner calm.” The magpies take flight. From their vantage point, we see the low-lying multiplex apartments of Montreal and the chaos of the trashed restaurant. Trish’s fuck buddy smiles from between the legs of a new girl, and Cannon’s mom helps a boy take off his backpack at the garderie. Cannon weeps into an expansive white space that only she and Trish inhabit. “Are you ok??” Trish asks. “I’m ok,” Cannon says. “I’ll tell you in a little. Promise.” ♦

For over a decade, the U.S. military has used the imaginary country of Atropia—“a neutral, Western-leaning oligarchy”—as a backdrop for training exercises. In “Atropia,” the début directorial effort of the actress Hailey Benton Gates, soldiers prepare for deployment to Iraq by spending time on a military base in the Mojave Desert where, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they pretend that they are occupying villages in an Iraq-like country. “Atropia” ’s story line focusses on one of the actors who populate the simulation, a young woman named Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) who is keen to break into Hollywood and instead finds herself even more profoundly bound up with her current workplace when she becomes infatuated with a soldier (Callum Turner) recently returned from the Middle East. Gates, who has had roles in films by Luca Guadagnino and the Safdie brothers, said recently that she had been driven to make the movie in part because she wanted to find a “strange way in” to the bloody story of the Iraq War. Not long ago, she spoke to us about a few books that she thinks share a kinship with her “military-industrial-complex romantic comedy.” Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

War Is a Racket

by Smedley D. Butler

I did a lot of research before I sat down to write “Atropia,” and one of the things I read that I was most struck by was this pamphlet by Smedley Butler, a Marine Corps major general who served in the First World War. Technically, it’s based on a speech that he gave, but the speech was so popular that they turned it into a book.

Butler’s ultimate argument is that, if war wasn’t profitable, we wouldn’t be going to war. He names the corporations and individuals that benefitted from the war. The chapter titles are great: “War Is a Racket,” “Who Makes the Profits?,” “How to Smash This Racket.” One of the solutions Butler proposes is to pay everyone involved in the war effort the same amount of money that a soldier makes, so there’s no profiteering. It would have been Butler’s nightmare to see soldiers privatized, as they often are today.

Enter Ghost

by Isabella Hammad

This is a fantastic novel about actors who are trying to stage “Hamlet” in the West Bank. The main character in it, Sonia, is similar to the main character in my film, Fayruz, insofar as she is also living between cultures and trying to understand where she most feels like herself. They’re also both Arab actresses who don’t look “Arab enough.”

Having an outsider’s point of view in the novel really helps Isabella tell the story of the occupation, because when you have a character who is trying to fit in and to understand things, it allows a lot of questions to be asked that someone who is local might not be able to ask. Another thing I love about “Enter Ghost” is that it finds a lot of humor and beauty in a really absurd and difficult environment. There’s a great moment at the beginning, for example, where Sonia sort of knows she’s going to get strip-searched at the airport, so she wears a really nice set of blue lace underwear in preparation.

Pastoralia

by George Saunders

For me, it feels impossible to talk about role-playing stories without talking about Saunders. He’s really the king.

“Pastoralia,” the title story in this collection, is about two people who work in a theme park, pretending to be cavemen. Like in “Atropia,” the main character is completely obsessed with maintaining authenticity, and is deeply frustrated by his co-worker, who is always breaking character, and by the inanity of the visitors who come and don’t really appreciate the prowess involved in his work. There are also corporate overlords, who are never seen.

My favorite detail from the story has to do with the fact that the cavemen-actors are supposed to roast goats, which sometimes appear and sometimes don’t—it’s up to the overlords—and the main character in the story finds it much easier to fret over the goat not being in the slot than to deal with real life beyond the simulation.

The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq

by Hassan Blasim

I think, because of the title, this book runs the risk of being misunderstood as very heavy. It definitely deals with the heaviest of subjects—death, war, betrayal. But it also has a gallows humor to end all gallows humor. The titular story is about an assassin who is having an extremely bureaucratic exchange with a recruit, explaining to him how best to arrange a tableau of dead bodies for maximum aesthetic effect. It’s chilling and hilarious—it reminds me slightly of the terrific Colombian mockumentary “The Vampires of Poverty.”

My favorite story in the collection is “The Green Zone Rabbit,” which is about these two young men who are crashing in a mansion in the green zone, and has a kind of “Waiting for Godot” quality to it. One of them begins to treat a rabbit as a pet, and eventually it lays an egg and the men freak out. It captures the eeriness of having an uncertain future in a place that has become totally lawless, and it also has a surrealism that turns out not to be totally surreal, which is something I wanted for my film, too.

Written on the Wall

by Shaun Lewis

This book is a collection of photographs of musings that were scrawled on porta-potty walls in Iraq, taken by a soldier during his deployment in 2004 and 2005. I think porta-potties had a kind of mythical status in the Iraq War, because these were the only places where soldiers had any alone time, and, because of that, could become places of pleasure and contemplation. The graffiti here includes extremely detailed drawings of sex acts and records of people coming out and cries of help and even poetry. Some of the most charming moments are when somebody has added a rebuttal to something. In one picture, someone has written “I wish I was where I was when I wished I was here.” Next to it, someone has scratched the words “Lil Bitch.” There’s more serious stuff, too—we put one in the movie that reads “We the unwilling, led by the unqualified, die for the ungrateful.” I wouldn’t say that the photography itself is meaningful or artful, but it’s an amazing collection of documents that, taken together, create a holistic portrait of that era.